GUEST POST from Julie Anixter

What did Nike, Starbucks, 3M, GE, Kraft, Puma, Pepsi, and Coke have in common last week? Along with too many world-class competitor brands to name, their top brand, design and marketing leaders were divulging intimate stories. “Beautiful, intellectual and evidentiary stories” as Capsule designer Kitty Hart so aptly called them, at FUSE, the brand design conference powered by IIR, and uber-design brains Debbie Millman and Cheryl Swanson. If you wanted the back-story, the behind the scenes, the what it looks and feels like to do the heavy lifting of great design on behalf of big brands, you were in the right place.

Though I only had a day there, I inhaled all the inspiration I could find with the zeal of a Dyson vacuum cleaner, leaving no session, chance meeting, meal or break conversation without a gem. I left fueled for the next round and my guess is that everyone else did too because when you get this many ridiculously talented people telling the stories of their projects and teams, they tend to go for the biggest emotional impact they can make for themselves and their profession. They tend to tell it all. Here are my top seven takeaways.  I’ll call them “design hacks”, acknowledging it’s stuff you can use, starting with the first keynote from Tom DeBlasis from Nike.

1. “We have blood on our hands.”

In sharp contrast to the beauty offered up in so many of the days’ earlier talks, the opening keynote, “These Are Game Changing Days” by Nike Global Design Director (formerly for Soccer, now for the Foundation) DeBlasis, openly admitted that much of what we design and produce ends up in land fills, the oceans, the stomachs of birds and fish. Of course, as smart people, we know this cause and effect situation to be true, and some of of us have seen Chris Jordan’s photographs of said birds, but DeBlasis’ talk about how his team brought well-honed design skills (observe, prototype, create etc.) to the post-earthquake devastation in Haiti was filled with eye popping, heart-rending evidence of what good design can do when applied to honoring and saving lives. Clean water filters, and a simple bucket with a soccer ball for motivation were the deliverable. Saving kids lives and serving them with some game-playing soccer fun were the impacts. This talk set the tone and context for the conference. Corporations, and especially their designers and brands stewards have an awesome responsibility to Life. Or to quote Replenish founder Jason Foster “90% of products are designed for the trash. Let’s innovate for the billions of people living here.”

2. Anything worth doing meets with Resistance.  So use it.

It’s never easy. The work of design, by definition is about change and inevitably disrupts the status quo.  Even if DeBlasis avoided initial internal resistance to his Haiti idea by simply charging his first trip to Port-Au-Prince on his Nike corporate credit card, (“I just typed in Seattle, then Port-Au-Prince…”) most of us have to stay put in Minneapolis or Cincinnati and deal. Kevin Gilboe, Design Manager for 3M spoke eloquently about design as a strategic corporate asset, one that the CEO wants to continue to leverage. Despite CEO intention, at one of the worlds’ TRUE innovation companies, resistance rattles on and of course it would. So what do they do? They name it. They honor it. They recognize that uneasiness leads to innovation, so they’re not afraid of it but treat it with respect.

3. Remembering We Have Bodies or Next Up, Kinesthetic Design!

In Embodied Cognition and the Psychology of Brands,  IDEO Design Directors Michael Hendrix and Neil Stevenson, packaged up recent research on neuroscience and empathy (Yale! USC! Stanford!) and told us what we all know in our own nervous systems but forget to design around, that a hot cup of coffee provokes a different feeling-state then say, an icy-cold one.  The brain, while we cannot see it, may be the last design frontier, especially if we acknowledge once and for all it’s connected to say, the hand, or the tongue.  Or to quote one of the conference participants “Glad to hear we’re still human.”

4. Artificial Environments Create Artificial Behaviors

According to Ivana Nikolic, Creative Director from DUPUIS , who co-presented with Bill

Less, Senior Design Manager from FRITO-LAY, we need to get out of the zoo and into the jungle to reach consumers on their own turf. They gave us a rollicking look at the “Bro-Cepts” they developed for Frito Lay aka the product concepts designed for “the bros” who desire a certain level of visceral snack consumption in their ritualistic game day and night pursuits. The video that brought “the Bro’s” to life and capped off this wonderful presentation had everyone laughing (another late night for the research team!) that ended in an all too familiar post game need state that feels JUST LIKE THIS:  “game over, need to cash it in, NEED FOOD, want something warm, greasy and heavy.”

5. And the winner is, “Coffee I Understand” and “Egotistical Agencies Need Not Apply.”

In case you’ve been too sleep or caffeine-deprived to notice, Starbucks has just introduced a new set of coffee categories: Blonde, Medium, Dark, and Flavored. One of the insights driving this global redesign was the simple acknowledgement that we consumers are asking to “let me go immediately to what I know I want,” whether it’s expresso beans, shaving cream or shampoo. A boatload of research, collaboration and design netted Starbucks a logo and package that became clearer and purer, and had consumers responding with “it’s clean, simple and easy to identify.” Find the roast you love the most says it all, except for the client, Global Coffee VP Tom Barr’s comment about his working with his agency, Tess Wicksteed, and the team at Pearl: “Egos and expertise often get in the way of collaboration and it just doesn’t work.  This is the way it should be.”

6. Food may be getting slower, but Design is still fast.

Jim Warner, Kaleidescope, wasted no time in laying out for me how joyous he was about his new firm’s approach:

• Co-creation – it’s cultural – ‘if you ain’t got that…you ain’t got NOTHING’ in his best Jersey-ese.

• Second, iterative design thinking, then…

• Rapid ideation

• Iterative protoyping, followed by

• Rapid research

• After that, the project starts.  So there!

7. Creativity is not about Efficiency.

The professions of brand building and design are built on a powerful foundation – the expression of creativity in response to human need and desire. Jonah Lehrer, author of Imagine, was conclusive in his message to the audience.  All this work, all this effort. It ain’t about efficiency. “Creativity is about serendipity. It’s human friction that makes the “sparks.” In keeping with the food theme, design-driven people are a hungry lot. Hungry for inspiration and for sparks. It’s why this voracious audience listened and schmoozed and ate and drank and talked some more for three days straight. Lehrer reminded us that “creativity is just connecting things.” Fuse 2012 was a sea of connections, renewing, provoking and humbling all at once.

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GUEST POST from Julie Anixter

If Only We Could Have Seen The Walgreens-Entertainment Deal Go Down!

How would you feel if your good friend was going on the Celebrity Apprentice?  Shock, fear, surprise, joy, mild anxiety coupled with great anticipation?  (Many of the same emotions it’s worth noting that often appear in the work of birthing new ideas.)  When Dean DeBiase announced to me that he’d be appearing – with Melissa Fisher, his CMO/COO on behalf of their company, Entertainment Promotions, I was so triggered into multiple states of response that I could only turn for comfort to what former celebrity therapist turned perfumer Mandy Aftel once pronounced:  “Genius is being able to hold conflicting feelings simultaneously!”  And I’m not talking about ME.  I’m talking about HIM. That may just be the genius of Donald Trump and his reality series. He inspires a Rainbow Room of emotions and the American public cannot stop engaging in his brand of Entrepreneurial Personality-Driven Entertainment, and he and his family just keep serving it up!

Dean DeBiase, Chairman and CEO, and Melissa Fisher, Chief Operating and Marketing Officer, appeared in a segment during the season introducing a challenge related to the recently launched Entertainment.com™ Savings Membership, an all digital membership featuring online and mobile coupons.   They seemed to be having fun.

We often counsel clients that “immersions” in new realities are a real way to get closer to the target audience and stimulate new thinking.   As I immersed in the truly surreal two-hour Celebrity Apprentice last night for the first time, I wondered how much of this circus was spontaneous and how much was, er, guided?  But to paraphrase Dalton Ross from EW.com you can’t make this “You weren’t dreaming — you were having a nightmare!” stuff up!

I so wished for the hidden mini cam filming the real backstage goings on.  It was two hours of fast prototyping (in their case the task was a television ad for entertainment) on steroids, over the top language and visceral collaboration that ended with the ceremonial “you’re fired!” from the great Donald, supported with hard hitting probes from two of his well heeled, steely-eyed multi millionaire offspring.  (“Did you really say that Lou?”)

Then I realized – hijinks aside, I already know the most important stuff that happened:

• Tens of thousands of dollars were raised for charity (Magic Johnson’s and others)
• Dean and Melissa got roughly 9 million people to learn about and engage in their brand in an ultimately bold, hilarious and provocative way, and
• The most important backstage goings on would never have been televised. The real stuff of entrepreneurial innovation, the create-something-out-of-whole-cloth stuff that is really the way it works when it works well.  The Walgreens Entertainment.com deal that got done behind the scenes backstage at the Celebrity Apprentice, happened…because…they were both there!

That deal got done with lightning speed because…and here is one key insight for innovators – not that they happened to bump into each other and but because they were opportunistically READY.   I can’t help but think that the patina and pulse of Casino-esque Trump empire contributed to their willingness to take some risks.

The Walgreens-Entertainment deal represents a great win for both companies.  In this highly publicized, Boardroom gladiators meet human celebrities atmosphere it’s not surprising that a new idea rocketed into public view. These Celebrity Apprentice people have no time to waste!  The public is waiting!  And they’re hungry!  And they want MORE!

Entertainment was able to quickly move to an alliance with the retailer and announce that its Entertainment.com™ Savings Membership, an all digital membership featuring online and mobile coupons, will be exclusively launched in Walgreens stores nationwide and all Duane Reade drugstores beginning in April.

Walgreens will carry the digital membership in the form of a pre-paid card available at all of its more than 7,800 stores, as well as all Duane Reade locations in New York and New Jersey.  Introduced in 2011, the Entertainment.com Savings Membership is an all digital alternative to the iconic Entertainment^® Book Membership. Together the products provide consumers with a choice as to which type of savings membership they prefer from Entertainment, allowing them to save anytime, anywhere and any way they want.

This deal was done literally backstage, when Dean and a Walgreens executive started bantering back and forth.

That it happened in record time, because it was intuitive and probably blindingly obvious is NOT par for the course in corporate America.  That’s a credit to decisiveness of the two companies.   That it now gets imbedded in their shared narrative of the Celebrity Apprentice makes it memorable.

And the five other kinds of innovation last night’s episode represented:

1. Marketing Innovation

How do you go up against Groupon, Google and Living Social if you’re Entertainment.com?  Not with your checkbook, that’s for sure, but with your wits!  Securing 9 million consumer eyeballs, the NBC promotion machine, and two brand new home-made commercials (by one of those New Jersey Housewives no less!) that while if not used, certainly will linger, was a perfect guerilla tactic.

And what better way to launch your mobile app then on Easter Sunday night after the last ham has disappeared and everyone’s settling in for some entertainment between the Masters and Mad Men?  I’m a big believer in the learning by doing, show the phenomenon school of communications.  Both commercials’ stories demo’ed the convenience of the mobile app, in the time honored context of love, lust, and parental overreaction.

2. Brand Innovation

Celebrity Apprentice, the Apprentice franchise, and Mr. Trump’s cultural zeitgeist may or may not appeal to you, but there are millions of other people who care.  Judging from the spirited debates on TMZ and Huffington Post Entertainment, this no holds barred competition enthralls the masses.  If you’re a mass, entrepreneurial brand, particularly one that appeals to all the coupon, discount and promotion mavens and Mom-pretreneurs who want to be helped to go into to business for themselves, this is a pretty perfect mashup.  Not to mention all the new merchants for whom you just became a household name.

3. New Product Innovation

Done on the fly.  Because they could.  Because it made sense.  See Walgreens deal above.

4. Cultural Innovation

Remember the old adage “sex sells?”  Perhaps, when it comes to the Celebrity Apprentice, it’s really evening in America after all.  Another great Dalton Ross on EW.com line, “And if I weren’t already so mentally scarred by the Teresa/Clay/Arsenio threesome, I would no doubt be extremely troubled by Aubrey cooing “Daddy!” at Paul and Paul immediately bringing up the topic of spanking.   What-in–the-name-of-a-strongly-worded-Human-Resources-sensitivity-training-memo is going on here? Gang bangs? Role playing? Spanking? Just another season of Celebrity Apprentice, baby!”  Baby indeed.

5. Personal Innovation

This was clearly a marketing innovation and coup for DeBiase, Fisher and Entertainment.com.

Entertainment.com is changing the discount and coupon industry by offering consumers a variety of options that allow them to save anytime, anywhere and any way they want.

“Being able to show our new all digital Entertainment.com Savings Membership, mobile app and even mobile coupon redemption on the show was….priceless” said  DeBiase.

According to Melissa Fisher, “What makes Celebrity Apprentice an ideal platform for brands is not only the huge audience it reaches, but the way it engages people with brands as few platforms can.  People who watch celebrities take on challenges in hopes of benefitting their charity get very involved with that brand.  They begin to take ownership of it – have a vested interest in it.  And that’s a very powerful benefit More importantly, it’s a very innovative show in the way that it brings consumers into contact with the companies it features – and that is so important for an innovative brand such as ours.”

This line up of innovations made Entertainment’s participation on the show a natural.  It’s great representation for Michigan through a homegrown business and a lot of fun.  Fun, different, and ideally, profitable.

imagecredit: tlc.com

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GUEST POST from Julie Anixter

The Chilean biologist Humberto Maturana once said that acknowledgement was the biological form of love. If it gives you pause you’re in good company. Even the brilliant Seth Godin said “he had to think about that for awhile.”   But Seth has helped us understand more about attention than most anyone — having helped to popularize the idea of interrupting/not interrupting others’ in his first book, Permission Marketing, way back when he headed up marketing at Yahoo.

In many ways the internet, this crazy ceaseless dance of virtual attention getting and giving is one unending minuet of acknowledging others.

What after all is traffic if not a dance card? What are Alexa and Compete and Google measuring anyway?   Ones and zeros?  I don’t think so.  All those hits, clicks, page views, spikes, ripples, stumbleupons, tweets and everything else they spawn?   It might be said that it is simply…Acknowledgement.

My friend the designer and Nissan auteur Jerry Hirshberg once said that ideas are very precious, and need to be given enough time and attention to develop because it is too easy — especially in teams and organizations — to kill them.   Acknowledgement, that nudging synapse that says “yes, pay attention” might just be front of the fuzzy front end for innovators.  So why don’t we do more of it?   Why do we withhold it so much of time? There is a fine line between selective and selfish.  It’s not just innovation that pays the price.  It’s all of us.  And especially the so-called learning cultures that desperately seek to innovate.   The democratization of publishing, aka showing up, and being willing to be seen even if it’s “just” online might portend an Arab Spring-like rude awakening for the corridors of power that don’t want to see what employees and customers really care about.

So in the spirit of the Namaste, that elegant Tibetan greeting that means “I see the light within you” I would like to acknowledge the people behind the scenes who’ve delivered the InnovationExcellence experience and platform to you, helping us create a bigger, and hopefully better, petri dish for serious conversations about what it’s like to practice innovation.  To do innovation.  You know!  You who live and work in 175 countries around the globe, and are busy working on so much interesting stuff.  You care seriously about the possibilities that innovation holds for life.  You are the proof in the pudding.  We acknowledged you and you have came right back at us!   But we could not have done it without the following community of creative human beings who made it so:

Braden Kelley — Braden is a force of nature.   He created and innovated BloggingInnovation.com out of whole cloth and worked ceaselessly for years to make it an open and inviting community — literally from his garage and his local Starbucks — with a laptop, armed with his trusty allies at Microsoft, Apple, HP, Intel, Google and all the other enabling elves,  and not much else except boundless energy and passion.   That community has become InnovationExcellence. We started this site with 2,500 substantive articles from innovation practitioners — many of you who are still blogging here. Braden is our executive editor, blogger, author, speaker, master class leader, former Navy service member, and true thought leader.

Rowan Gibson — Having worked with Tom Peters for five years it took me a nano-second to recognize Rowan’s energy.   He’s made building enterprise innovation a lifelong pursuit and poured that energy into Innovation Excellence.   He named it (in what I believe was a tip of the hat to Tom’s In Search of Excellence.)  He saw Braden’s work and gave it an infusion that you’re holding in your hands now. Also a tireless author, speaker, masterclass trainer — he’s our roving eyes and ears around the globe.

The far-flung web design team includes tireless support from Arndt Schönewald at Quelltext AG in Germany, Ian Fay at St. Gorilla in DC, and the great design team at Maga Design, Juraj Mihalik, Grant Smith, Rebecca and Scott Williams, in the East Village of Washington, Adams Morgan. Zulma Acevedo keeps careful watch from Costa Rica. They all gave us their best mojo in 2011.

We sing praises to our two 24×7 editors, Mari Anixter, Dru Sturgess for their rigor and devotion, and our contributing editors Joan Holman, Alex Gemo and Leanna Carey, Holly Green, Paul Hobcraft, Luis Solis, Deb Scofield-Mills and Jason Anixter. Right along side of them is our home town business team, Dean DeBiase and Ed Orlowsky – the Chicagoans.

Our sponsors, especially Clearworks, Planview, Hype, and Imaginatik were invaluable and oh so timely in their generous support.

Our favorite photographer/cognitive-creative in the world, Pete Foley, whose flickr stream has graced our pages and will continue to do so. His summit from the great wall is to your left.   This team has had an incredible experience collaborating together. It’s been a peak with very few valleys because your energy and writing and contribution showing up every day has been a feast…and made Innovation Excellence the world’s largest crowd-sourced innovation website.

There is an indelible connection between the ability not just to see, but to acknowledge what you see, and innovation. Tom Peters has always talked about, and lived (!) being “a connoisseur of talent.” George Simon once said “it’s such a delight to be seen.”   To that we’ll add, it’s such a delight to collaborate with all of you.  We see you! Happy New Year.

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GUEST POST from Julie Anixter

Just Watch the Andy Awards PSA

There is a reason we love what we love.  Call it the law of attraction, the oldest game in town, or just the pleasure in being moved.   To paraphrase David Kelley, with the exception of Nature, there’s usually a designer/creative behind, well, EVERYTHING.  If the world is turning into one big interface then its creatives like these that float my boat and me smile deep inside, and I daresay, RULE.  They also remind us of the indelible connection between innovation and design, and yes, humor.   See what you think.  Maybe even win a prize. Before the world ends!

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GUEST POST from Julie Anixter

Would that Santa could bring us a few more Bill Strickland’s!  Or better yet, the “1%” could take a page out of his book.

Why? Since 1972, the organization he leads, Bidwell-Manchester, has attracted national recognition for its innovative and career-oriented training that changes the lives of people in transition in southwestern Pennsylvania. Bidwell provides literacy and remedial education and partners with leading corporations to design high-caliber, market-relevant career training programs that lead to entry-level employment. For more than 40 years, its sister Manchester Craftsmen’s Guild has been a unique haven—a multi-disciplined arts and learning center that fosters a sense of belonging, interconnections, and hope within the urban community.  Simply put, he’s broken the code.

The entrepreneurial leadership he has demonstrated over many decades is one heck of a Solving-Big-Problems Archetype.  If we were able to amplify Bill’s efforts — let’s say by upping his funding so he could spread his training and crafts guild model around the globe — what would it look like?

Poverty and joblessness would disappear.  And in the process the art of entrepreneurial wisdom would be handed down to the generations. Personal dignity and creative mastery would be on the rise. People wouldn’t feel lost.  They would instead feel loved. And mentored — which come to think of is a true form of love.  And the world would be a much better place.

Meet Bill Strickland, founder and CEO of the Manchester Craftsmen’s Guild and Bidwell Training Center in Pittsburgh’s North Side. This year Bill was honored with the 2011 Goi Peace Award, an international honor whose past recipients include Bill Gates, writer Deepak Chopra and Nobel Peace Prize winner Oscar Arias Sánchez.

“By offering innovative educational and cultural opportunities with emphasis on the arts, beauty and respect, he has empowered thousands of youth and adults to restore hope and dignity and become creative contributors to their communities,” the Tokyo-based Goi Peace Foundation said of Strickland, who received the award on Nov. 19 in Japan.

“The award is an honor,” Strickland said. “But at the end of the day, I still have to go work.” Said like a true Saint. Which without going over the top — is just so easy to say of this man.  Merry Christmas Bill and Manchester-Bidwell.

“A successful life is not something you simply pursue, it is something that you create, moment by moment.”  – Bill Strickland

Learn more about Manchester Bidwell Corporation and how you can get involved here.   Read about Bill in Make the Impossible Possible.

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GUEST POST from Julie Anixter

My partner at Maga Design, Scott Williams, often talks about the “theater of the room.” Unbeknownst to me, the creatives in our firm surprised us Thursday night and I enjoyed it so much that I now invite you to a second wave visual Xmas Party.

In a lovely demo of on the spot ingenuity  (and a tip of the hat to Paul Hobcraft) — Maga Design’s senior designer, Juraj Mihalik, turned the annual Maga Design Holiday party into a 2.0 visual feast.  Here’s how:

1.  He downloaded an app, sparkbooth.

2.  He set up the photo booth.

3.  He linked the app to Flickr.

4.  He streamed the flickr feed for good measure to another screen, on the bar (where else?)

5.  He acquired props. They weren’t hard to come by. Design agencies are good at “play.” Especially when they have kids. And ours do.

6.  He documented it whilst it was going on…which seemed somehow “old school.”

7.  Human nature, conviviality, healthy exhibitionism, documentary urges, kicked in.  Doesn’t some visual magic heighten that?

8.  The corner of restaurant we’d taken over was a jazz ensemble of pop-pose-flash-repeat…with just a long enough sequence between photos that it resembled a Christmas Kabuki dance.   Each digital click of the camera elicited a new move.

9.   It was very fun. It was visual. It immediately created the energy of improv.  It was participatory theater: a mix of old and new friends from the DC metro area and parts beyond.  And it amplified the holiday spirit — when being yourself and being with each other is cause for celebration — whether you stepped in for a photo or not.

10. Come join our 2.0 visual Xmas Party and see for yourself!

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GUEST POST from Julie Anixter

Maybe you’ve seen it because it came out in 2009. But I hadn’t… until Cliff Huang at Fast Company’s co.design brought it to the attention of one of our agencies’ designers.   Suddenly we were all voting on which of the 13 rules for realizing your creative vision resonated with each of us and the truth is that in our design firm,  just about all of them did.

It’s not often that you stumble across something so resonant, so authentic, as the Done Manifesto,  If you’re just coming to the Prototyping Life it may stop you in your tracks.  Or it may have in 2009 when Maker Bot founder Bre Pettis, in collaboration with Kio Stark, wrote The Cult of Done Manifesto in 20 minutes. Here it is:

Dear Members of the Cult of Done.

“I present to you a manifesto of done. This was written in collaboration with Kio Stark in 20 minutes because we only had 20 minutes to get it done.”

This got it done for me.  Because it is the most visceral description of  “doing the work,” and the emotional/psychological nature of fast prototyping, iterating and working in the discipline of innovation that I’ve seen anywhere. This is not what just ‘creative vision’ feels like.  This is what it feels like to create.  “Create” and “Innovate” share the same root: “ate” — which essentially means to consume, to preoccupy and engross.

A prediction: in 2012 more of us will refuse to be stifled and will insist on ever greater levels of consuming experimentation, inquiry, tire-kicking, making stuff fast aka rapid prototyping and then discarding it, and generally walking that fine line between the perfectionistic nature of “professionalism” and the messy, organic, alive-ness of “creative” work.  Work is creative!  But sadly, for many people, it should be more creative. To strike that balance on a daily basis between presentable and push requires many things: discipline, the ability to communicate the context, intention, ideas worth messing around with, a place to mess around, and a couple of willing colleagues, emotional resilience — just to name a few. And it requires courage.

I am hooked  on exploring the role of courage in innovation, and the role of innovation in what I believe for far too many companies is a “PTSD economic climate.”  More real world examples will be coming soon.  Done.

Image by James Provost.  License via Creative Commons
“Innovate” Online Etymology Dictionary. Douglas Harper, Historian. 17 Dec. 2011. “Create.” Online Etymology Dictionary. Douglas Harper, Historian. 17 Dec. 2011. .

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GUEST POST from Julie Anixter

This week’s mashup continues to witness the outpouring of love and tribute to Steve Jobs with minor apologies to those of you who have told me you’re tired of it.  Mourning is a process.  We are in it.

Best Words – Steve Jobs, The Secular Prophet “That bitten apple was just one of Steve Jobs’s many touches of genius, capturing the promise of technology in a single glance. The philosopher Albert Borgmann has observed that technology promises to relieve us of the burden of being merely human, of being finite creatures in a harsh and unyielding world. The biblical story of the Fall pronounced a curse upon human work—”cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life.”

Best Images – The Obituaries Steve Jobs Would Have Loved by Kit Easton.  Every picture tells a story, story.  Fast Company’s does a great job of curating here.  These pictures rip right through the heart of the creative and tech communities that feel the loss so personally and want to celebrate the man’s life and gifts to us.

Not Just for Designers – Apple’s Impact on Healthcare – LeAnna J. Carey, our healthcare editor, captured Jobs’ impact on whole industries in her piece mHealth – Making Steve Jobs Proud providing a great snapshot of the innovations Steve Jobs and Apple have enabled in healthcare.

Double Entendre – Do “Jobs” takes on new meaning? Is it just me, or has anyone else noticed that the steady media and political drumbeat of the word “jobs,”  the very unit of measure, that declares what is missing in our economy, that is repeated every minute of every hour, that, according to a new study from Gallup CEO Dan Clifford, represents the new American (and probably every other countries) definition of the American Dream is of course…Steve Jobs’ last name.  What we need, what we want, what we must create to be truly vibrant, is of course jobs — inextricably, linguistically, linked forever to the founder of Apple.

Photo:  BeaconRadio

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GUEST POST from Julie Anixter

What do we love most about working in innovation?  The long hours?  The inspired clients? The successful launches? The fast failures? I think not.

I think what the people I know who work at innovation love most about it is the premise. Innovation by definition is about the introduction of something new — starting with what Jerry Hirshberg called the “seedling” of a new idea. All of this — our commitment to exploration, our innate curiosity, our profession’s philosophical and yes, moral stance, makes Liz Ryan’s post on Bloomberg/Businessweek even more chilling.   In my Organizational Development days we used to call the kind of managers Ryan outs “the frozen middle.” That is putting it kindly.  They are innovation killers.

These statements are draconian, and worse, ignorant.  Yet we have all heard them. They make us shudder, because they are the simplest, fastest way to kill the human spirit at work and make any kind hope for a culture of innovation DOA.  Therefore, if you hear any of these phrases uttered where you work, don’t pass go, do speak up and send these so called managers straight to innovationexcellence, chain them to their screens, and don’t let them get up until they have a change of heart.

New ideas, innovations big and small, and the people who are necessary to actually sweating over them require heart. Fear can be a great motivator for some things.  But not for innovation. Forewarned is forearmed.  Liz Ryan’s piece is a journalistic warning across the bow …starting with the first two epithets:

“Who gave you permission to do that? “ and my favorite… “I didn’t hire you to think.” Read on.

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GUEST POST from Julie Anixter

One of the best things about the blogosphere is bumping into original thinkers like Venessa Miemis.  She’s working on a couple of projects that merit attention of innovation practitioners — and especially those who are working to create new ways to think about financial and social transactions and define value.  She’s recently written on the why the future of money matters and asks the provocative question — is the current system obsolete?

Like Miemis I too was struck by New York Mayor Bloomberg’s statement last week that unemployment could “turn New York City into Egypt.”  We find her here in a recent post preparing for a  ‘future of money’ talk for SIBOS in Toronto where she has the chutzpah to “paint a picture for the bankers about where the future may be heading.”

If necessity is the mother of invention then the world’s current economic crisis will stimulate and give rise to new forms of exchange, new economic models, new constructs for jobs, employment and economic survival.   The formal innovation process require stimulus as well.  If I were working in financial services right now, and I’m not, I’d be paying attention to Venessa. I would consider inviting her — as an outlier — to work on projects or do the fireside chat.   Here’s the article in full…

I just saw an article from the NY Times – Bloomberg, on Radio, Raises Specter of Riots by Jobless – with the NYC mayor hinting that the combination of enormous public debt and high unemployment could lead to rioting, as we’re currently seeing in other parts of the world.

As I’m looking at this article, I’m also preparing my ‘future of money’ talk for SIBOS in Toronto next week, where I’ll have just a few minutes to paint a picture for the bankers about where the future may be heading.

I’ve been trying to think about how to frame it, because it’s bigger than just talking about banks being disintermediated due to mobile payment platforms and peer to peer technology. There’s a larger discussion to be had about the nature and design of currency itself, its inherent biases towards certain types of behavior, and its impact on living systems. There’s also a story about the human desire to redefine what wealth means and to be empowered to create local economies that are biased towards cooperation and abundance.

It would seem, based on many of the things I’ve been reading, that allowing a variety of parallel currency systems to emerge would help meet the needs of people in these rough economic times, provide jobs, and create options for how value is created and exchanged. I don’t imagine it to be a panacea for all our problems (the system’s way too complex for that), but I do find cause for evidence-based optimism. There are some interesting historical precedents of local currency solutions being highly effective, and some scary implications of what happens when you take away this ability for people to help themselves. Allow me to share a bit I’ve been reading in Bernard Lietaer’s book, The Future of Money:

First, he gives a nice description of the socio-political consequences of what he calls “the vicious circle of unemployment.”

(I love reading about feedback loops. So much of our thoughts and behaviors are based on the programming and conditioning of the space between our ears, and you can just look at how we’ve responded in the past to similar situations to get an idea of what’s going to happen in the future.)

6 Step Feedback Loop:

1. Unemployment creates a feeling of economic exclusion
2. Part of those touched express it through violence
3. Most ordinary people react to the violence with fear
4. Community breaks down, society becomes unstable, political polarization increases
5. Fewer investments take place, fewer things are bought
6. The investment climate deteriorates. More unemployment is created.

Repeat.

Lietear then gives examples of how we’ve seen this cycle over and over throughout history, and what people do about it. Since there is really no shortage of work to be done, and no shortage of people willing and capable of doing the work, the issue is that there’s just no money to incentivize people to do it. So, how about changing the monetary framework?

It’s been shown to work, time and again. Here’s a story about the German ‘Wara’ system:

As a response to the hyperinflation period in Germany in the 1920s, a monetary experiment took place in the small town of Swanenkirchen. A coal mine owner, faced with the closing of the mine, created a new currency called Wara, which was backed by the coal inventory. A monthly demurrage tax was implemented, which disincentivizes hoarding and keeps money circulating within the community. The coal mine workers agreed to accept 90% of their pay in Wara, and other merchants in town agreed to accept Wara as payment for goods and services.

The currency worked so well that it began spreading until over 2,000 corporations in Germany were using it. The central bank perceived a threat, and in October 1931 the Ministry of Finance decreed the Wara illegal. Consequently, the coal mine shut down, unemployment went up again, and social unrest increased.

Broadly, people were prohibited from using the solutions they had created to help themselves, and so the only alternative was to seek a savior or a strong centralized solution. [one could argue this created favorable conditions for Adolf Hitler]

There’s a nice graph in the book showing the direct correlation between the level of unemployment and the percentage of seats captured by National-Socialism in Germany in the elections between 1924 and 1933, highlighting step #4 in the above loop of unemployment and political extremism.

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